Leading Organisational Change in African Seventh-day Adventist Churches: Context, Resistance, Leadership, and a Research Agenda

Organisational change presents a distinctive leadership challenge for Christian denominations whose institutional structures, theological commitments, cultural identities, and missional practices intersect. This challenge is particularly significant for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Africa, where denominational expansion has occurred alongside continuing debates concerning contextualization, organisational authority, leadership participation, worship, and institutional adaptation. This article presents an integrative review of literature relevant to organisational change in African Seventh-day Adventist contexts. Rather than treating resistance as organisational inertia or opposition to innovation, the article argues that change resistance is better understood as a multidimensional phenomenon involving theological identity, historical memory, cultural legitimacy, institutional trust, leadership practice, and perceptions of authority. Evidence from Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, and South Africa indicates that organisational change becomes particularly contentious when proposed innovations are perceived to threaten denominational identity, bypass participatory processes, or reproduce asymmetrical relationships between institutional authorities and local congregations. Conversely, the literature suggests that change is more sustainable when leaders combine theological legitimacy, contextual intelligence, stakeholder participation, transparent communication, incremental implementation, and institutional learning. The article proposes a contextual-theological framework for understanding change in African Adventism and identifies significant deficiencies in the current evidence base, including geographical concentration, dependence on dissertations and professional projects, limited comparative research, and insufficient investigation of successful change processes. It concludes that organisational change in African Adventist churches should be conceptualized neither as the abandonment of tradition nor as the uncritical adoption of innovation, but as a process of mission-oriented institutional discernment through which theological continuity and contextual responsiveness are negotiated.